QUESTIONS ARISING FROM 74th. MEETING – 3/2/17(the record of earlier meetings can be downloaded from the main Circulus page)

​We dined on agnīna assa (roast lamb) and acetāria (salad) preceded by caseus (cheese) and olīvae etpānis (olives and bread), finishing with placenta socolāta (chocolate cake) and meringa in crūstō cocta (meringue pie) and all washed down with vīnum coctum (mulled wine), whilst sitting in Keon and Tanya’s courtyard (ārea), which can be seen in the photograph of our 2014 gathering on the Circulus web-page (http://linguae.weebly.com/circulus-latinus-honcongensis.html).

Also on the food and drink front, we briefly disussed the etymology of `chip-butty’, which in northern English dialect for a bread and butter sandwich containing chips (known to Americans as `French fries’) and could be inelegantly expressed in Latin as pastillum fagmentīs solānōrum fartum. `Butty’ is simply a shortening of `butter’ with the `y’ suffix added. Mentioned too were the Ethiopian origins of coffee (caffea, -ae f), which seems first to have been consumed in the very strong form now known as `Turkish coffee. Finally, we touched on the word crustulum, defined in Lewis & Short’s dictionary as `a small pastry’ and now the standard neo-Latin for `biscuit’ The word is used in the rather free version of the song `Cottleston Pie’ in Winnie Ille Pu, the famous translation of Milne’s children’s classic:

​​The Kam Tin meeting was intended to mark the start of the Year of the Rooster. Pat explained that Chinese New Year’s Day, falling this year on 28 January by the Western calendar, was the closest new moon to the first day of spring, that day itself being fixed at the mid-point between the winter and vernal equinoxes.

Pat was recently back from a trip to the Caucasus, where he had visited Georgia and Armenia, countries which, for their size, have a higher concentration than anywhere else of World Heritage sites but which have suffered in the political turmoil which accompanied the weakening and fall of the Soviet Union. Present-day Georgia includes the territory which once comprised the kingdom of Colchis, whose legendary King Aeetes supposedly possessed the Golden Fleece that Jason and the Argonauts came in search of. In 2007 a statue of Medea, Aeetes’ daughter, who assisted Jason in stealing the Fleece, was erected in the Georgian port of Batumi.

Georgia is inhabited principally by speakers of Georgian, an exceedingly complex Caucasian language, but its South Ossetian region shares the Iranian-related Ossetian language with the people of North Ossetia on the Russian side of the border (see the map of ethnic groups in the Caucasus below). South Ossetia was granted a degree of autonomy under the Soviet Union, probably as a reward for helping the Bolshevik regime top bring Georgia under its control. Their demands for greated devolved powers led to violent clashes with the central Georgian government and eventually to a brief war between Russi and Georgia in 2008. South Ossetia is now effectively an independent state under Russian protection and the Georgians have been seeking to develop new maritimg trade routes to replace their tradional links wih Russia. Europe Square in Batumi, where the Medea statue now stands, was probably so-named to reflect this new orientation.

The Armenians who are Christian and speak an Indo-European language closely related to Persian have been in conflict since the 1980s with neighbouring Azerbaijan, whose inhabitants are mostly Azeris, a Muslim and Turkic speaking community with the greater part of its members actually living in Iran. The dispute is over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclavw which is a mainly Armenian-speaking region surrounded by traditionally Azeri speaking-territory and assigned under Stalin to Azerbaijan:

Fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan was ended by a ceasefire in 1996 but minor clashes continued and there was a major flare-up last year – see the Economist report at: http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21696563-after-facing-decades-armenia-and-azerbaijan-start-shooting-frozen-conflict-explodes Although Azerjaiban’s oil reserves may make it potentially the stronger power, the Armenians have generally held the upper hand and are in miltary control both of the disputed region itself and of surrounding parts of Azerbaijan-proper (see the map above). Nagorno-Karabakh is technically still an autonomous region of Azerbaijan but uses the Armenian currency and one of its former presidents later became president of Armenia. Ethnic cleansing has removed a large part of the Muslim population from the region between Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenian border. The frontier between Armenian and Azerbaijani-controlled territory remains closed.

Despite all the political complexities, Pat enjoyed the trip but commented on the exteme machoism of Armenian culture and the prevalent homophobia.

Back in Hong Kong, Pat had been compiling a report on the government’s `small house’ policy, under which since the 1970s male indigenous villagers in the New Territories have been allocated land to build a house which they may then either occuy themselves or lease out to others. This had recently come under legal challenge but there were in fact precedents for the policy dating back to 1906.

We read another six sections of Ciceronis Fīlius (see below). These focused on the Roman educational system, including instruction in arithmetic, for which use was made of small stones (calculī, -ōrum m. from which `calculate’ is derived.) placed in a sand tray and moved in a similar way to the wooden pieces on a Chinese abacus.

The extracts included mention of the shorthand system (Notae Tirōniānae) attributed to Cicero’s freedman, Tiro, which was not widely learned until some time after his death but then continued in use into the Middle Ages. It is generally supposed that the purpose was simply to allow the taking of rapid notes but someone suggested that is was originally intended as a cipher to preserve confidentiality. The truth seems to be that the word notae itself was used both for shorthand and for a cipher and that the system(s) of the former used in Rome was the work of a number of persons over a long period. For the conflicting statements of ancient authors on the topic see the account in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, available on-line at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Nota.html We noted also that, as a common noun rather than a personal name, tirō meant a new army recruiter and, by extension, a beginner in any field.

Paul mentioned the widespread use of stenogrpahers in the recording of modern-day court proceedings. He recalled that when he began work as a lawyer there was acshortage and that at one point expatriate judges were allowed one but the sole Chinese judge had to take his own notes in long-hand.

Finally we mentioned the verb trādō (<trāns + dō, `hand over’) and the use of the derived agent noun trāditor to mean `traitor’. Pat said this originated from the persecution by the Roman authorities of Christians in North Africa. They were ordered to hand over their scriptures and those who complied were regarded by the others as traitors.